 The full score of Emerging Dances | To write for an orchestra, you need to know the sounds and characters of all the different instruments |
The ‘sound’ a piece of music makes greatly affects how it is heard. This might seem blindingly obvious, but the overall sound is not something which is often put under the microscope.
David Horne is very particular about the sound his compositions make, as he explains. He thinks of his ideas very specifically in terms of the instruments that will play them – each note is carefully written for its instrument and none other. So it was not an easy exercise for him to arrange his original version of Emerging Dances for a different orchestration.
Here he talks about his approach to 'scoring' – planning and writing the notes for each instrument in the orchestra.
David Horne was asked to compose two versions of Emerging Dances. (The second version is called Emerging Dances II.) There are many points of comparison between the two.
In these next two examples, David has changed the instrumentation between the two versions. In version I, the chords are for high strings, and for high woodwind in the version II. What do you think of the effect?
As you perhaps noticed, the strings and woodwind exchange is not a straight swap, as David Horne clearly still wanted the high strings with their accents somewhere in the second version.
A similar change occurs a little later in Emerging Dances. This time the strings in version I play together a repeated chord; in version II, they exchange with the horn, trumpet and trombone.
So why did David write this second version of Emerging Dances? Basically to show some of the changes or choices he could have made. For him, the original version is always 'right' and better, but what do you think?
